“So, a protest about a protest about a riot. There should be some kind of prize for this.” That was the Facebook status of Arin de Hoog, Dutch-Canadian journalism student in London, after he had heard what happened in Port Said this week. In this opinion piece he tries to explain his disappointment with the situation in Egypt.
In a discussion about familial heritage and national pride a childhood friend of mine once declared to me, “I’m from ancient Egypt, man.”
Never mind the fact that he was born in Canada, had maybe visited Egypt three times in his life, and he didn’t speak a word of any dialect of Arabic, he didn’t say he was from Egypt, he said ancient Egypt.
Which you can do with Egypt, I guess. Being from ancient Netherlands doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and saying you’re from ancient Canada will earn you a condescending ‘there-there’ pat on the head. Egypt, however, is ancient, and saying you’re from the ancient part — which is idiotic without time-travel — brings to mind a staggering history and the birth of civilization.
Like Paris in the 20s, and California now, Egypt was the place to be 5000 years ago. You don’t have to look far to figure that out. In fact, you don’t really have to look past your computer screen. The website love-egypt.com helpfully educates the interested with the heading, ‘Egypt Civilization invention of: [sic]’ and the following bullet-points beneath it: Glass, Linen, Paper and ink (sort of embarrassing to invent one and not the other), the calendar, the clock, Geometry (now my 13-year-old self knows who to blame), The Refinement of dress and ornament (which basically means “adding gold”), and Furniture and dwellings (after centuries of standing, finally humans could comfortably sit down). The last bullet-point, which negates all the previous bullet-points, is ‘Society and life’. Egypt invented that.
Facetiousness aside, you get the idea. Egypt was the center of beauty, glory, and human history. From Tutankhamun, to Alexander the Great, to the tale of tragic love between Antony and Cleopatra. The pyramids, the sphinx, and the Suez Canal all represent monolithic human endeavours which occurred centuries before humans were commonly engaging in monolithic human endeavours. The English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818 wrote, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” in reference to the amazing structures which dot the country’s landscape. And the people; dressed in the finest linens, draped with the most beautiful jewellery, flowing black hair oiled to a sheen, lithe strong bodies tanned golden by the sun, proud handsome faces, eyes darkened and made startling by kohl, and an upright dignity illustrated by their carvings on tablets and stone.
People, who today, are forced to secure various baked goods to their heads with tape by way of protecting themselves from being bludgeoned to death by their own police and military. In my mind, as an ignorant occidental, this is the lingering image I have of Egypt when I think of its people; photographs of angry men wearing buckets and cooking pots as helmets, and wielding mops and brooms as weapons. Janitors gone wild.
Which is totally unfair and denigrates a civil uprising against an oppressive regime fronted for 30 years by Hosni Mubarak.
By who?
Let’s face it, Egypt hasn’t really been the focus of deep international scrutiny since they started trading slaps with Israel in the 50s and the international media had the capacity to cover it. In the early 70s Anwar Sadat, the previous Egyptian President, waged a six day war to retrieve land from the Israelis. Then, spotty coverage by ill-placed reporters tried to colour commentate the conflict without the relative benefit of a 24-hour news cycle. Anyway, the war was mostly of interest to diplomats, and news-junkies. In ’77, intrepid American über-reporter, Barbara Walters, managed to get Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, to sit in the same room without spitting on each other, thus bringing Egypt briefly into Western popular culture. Then came the assassination of Sadat in ’81. We heard he was replaced by Hosni Mubarak and everything seemed to by honky-dory in Egypt for the next 30 years. At least Honky-dory enough to not warrant popular western examination by people peripherally aware of international issues.
Lately, as it turns out however, it’s come to light that Mubarak was widely considered in Egypt to be a jerk. Caught in the riptide of the civil revolt tsunami that raced across the Middle-East in 2010/2011 the people of Egypt started loudly voicing their dislike towards their President. Using social networking tools, like blogs, and facebook, they organized demonstrations, rallies, and protests and became part of pop-culture by symbolizing the heart-warming and highly sellable rise of ‘The will of the people’. This is somewhat poetic because back when they were ancient Egyptians they weren’t part of pop-culture, they were pop-culture. It also seems like they’ve gotten so good at demonstrations, rallies, and protests that they can’t stop, despite managing to oust Mubarak and send him into lockdown in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Today Al-Jazeera — the Qatar-based news organization which has gained a firm foothold in terms of journalistic credibility because of their coverage of Egypt and the ‘Arab Spring’— reported that, “At least two people have been shot and killed in the Egyptian city of Suez, as police used live rounds to hold back crowds during a protest… Earlier, hundreds of people were injured in the capital, Cairo, after police fired tear gas at protesters who accused the ruling military council of mismanaging the country.” This mismanagement seemed to have to do with the country’s, “security forces’ failure to prevent a deadly football riot.”
Really? A riot over football? Dubious reasons to riot aside, what we have here is a protest about a protest about a riot. Sort of a Russian nesting doll of violent civil unrest.
The complaint seems to be that, although Egypt’s security forces do a lousy job of protecting people from Egypt’s security forces, they do an even worse job of protecting Egyptians from each other.
A fair complaint, but rather like saying, “You know we’re totally irresponsible and loopy about football, you should have stopped us from doing irresponsible and loopy things while football was on.”
Ironically, the Emergency Law — an Orwellian law activated by Egypt’s first President, Gamal Nasser, in ’67, which smothers constitutional rights, gives the police excess power, and is understandably the source of much grief for the civilian population —would have been useful on Wednesday when the football riots happened. Unfortunately the law had been rolled back a week before by the current military head, Hussein Tantawi. Well, mostly rolled back. There is still one minor caveat; police have total discretion in situations of perceived ‘thuggery’. I’m not sure what his definition of ‘thuggery’ is, but if deadly football hooliganism isn’t it, I don’t know what is.
Regardless, it’s probably not fair to target one incident from a particular group of people, namely football fans. And I understand (understand, not agree with, or find intelligent) the political and cultural implications behind a football match. Lord knows I get pretty excited about some sports, but I don’t then storm my flat and kill my roommates if my team doesn’t win. This sort of thing makes me think Egyptians can’t take care of themselves. It also makes me wonder: If this is the situation in Egypt now, how bad was it under Mubarak?
The very idea of a pro-democratic revolution makes the western world giddy with romantic thoughts about the strength of human will against the forces of tyranny: Good versus evil, the ninety-nine percenters against the despotic one percent, the right to be ruled by electoral representation in opposition to a cockeyed and corrupt political system. It all seems very worthwhile. And it is. It also all seems very black and white. If you’re a good person you back the underdog — the seekers of social justice. In this case, at least to me, it’s not really clear who the underdog is. I know it’s supposed to be the people without the guns, the people that wear baguettes on their heads instead of helmets, but 47 dead after a game of football makes you wonder where people’s priorities are.
No revolution is as rosy as the history books describe it for two reasons. One, the convergence, overlapping, and opposition of the hundreds of interests and personal politics that go into an uprising is so convoluted you risk and aneurism trying to make sense of it. The second is that ‘the good guys’ are relative to who wrote the history. In all cases it’s the winners that set the tone.
With the proliferation of social media, combined with up-to-the-second reports from newscasters and unfiltered tweets by civilians the audience is so intimately aware of what’s going on they are practically childhood mates with its participants. This is an uncomfortable place to be if the ‘good guys’ are acting like. . well. . . overzealous fans at a football match.
So you hope the underdogs know what they want, and they’re not rioting for the sake of rioting like London last year, and Vancouver the year before. You hope that there is a goal they’re aspiring to, and even if it’s not evident to them now, they’ll recognize a good thing when they finally have it.
Going back to Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the next lines in the poem following ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ are “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The hope, also, is that when the dust settles, and this second attempt at the casino slot-machine is finished, this won’t be the fate of the Egyptian people. The hope is that they get what they want. Whatever that is.
arindehoog 